Re: 'Hacking The Mainframe': What Hollywood Gets Wrong About Its Favorite Tech

[Dale Miller]

It wasn't always blinking lights that the public and Hollywood equated  
to computers. I think that of the movies I have seen, most of them  
focused (pun not intended) on spinning reel-to-reel tape drives. At  
one point I went to work at a company which was replacing an  
antiquated multiple-computer, tape-sequential-processing order entry  
system with an IMS database system on a 370/158. the company invited  
the local press to cover the system going online. Of course, the press  
photographers pointed their flash cameras at the tape drives, which  
used optical sensing in the columns instead of vacuum sensing. When  
the flashbulbs went off, the drives dumped the tapes for both the  
primary and secondary IMS logs, and the system took a nosedive.
Even farther back in the mists of time, I was a sysprog at a college  
where the data center was driven by a 360/40. When a new operator  
(usually a student) was hired, they were invariably subjected to a bit  
of hazing where someone would distract them and an accomplice would  
sneak around and flip the "lamp test" switch which turned on all of  
the lights on the front of the processor, including the OMG red ones  
such as the check stop light. At the same school, the temperature  
differential between outdoors and the computer room could easily reach  
130 degrees in the dark of winter, resulting in excessively low  
humidity in the computer room and a lot of sparks flying. If someone  
brought in a tray of punch cards and jostled the input table so that  
it touched the card reader, the red lights lit up the processor.

Dale Miller
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